by Tracey Roberts
I was delighted and felt very privileged when ade ishs commissioned me to do the artwork for his latest release Four Seasons Suite.
I have always loved ade’s music — it makes me smile — it is so rich and luscious, spiritual and uplifting, so it was a pleasure to sit and listen to the four movements and just close my eyes and let the colours flow. Music–colour synesthesia is a wonderful gift — I enjoy it every day of my life and it enriches beautiful music, making it even MORE amazing.
Reminding myself that the art I was creating needed to “fit into a box” and was meant to represent four separate movements, with some overlap, all of it needed to be directed in a forward-moving and upwards motion in line with the overall sense I have of ade’s music being so uplifting and enlightening. When I first heard this suite of music I immediately felt an golden sense of soaring, it’s so exhilarating… and the feeling of surrender and bathing in its richness was very apparent too throughout all the music so I knew the artwork would get deeper and richer, particularly in the middle section with many layers and rich E♭ hot pinks and blue Ds. Darker blues are the depths and groundswells of the oceans and the lighter blues represent the cloudy spiritual nature of the sky.
I basically produced it as I heard the four movements in order from top left to bottom right — so the image has four “sections” which merge into each other, as the seasons do.
Summers naturally have a lot of yellow A major colours for me so it made sense that there would be elements of gold at the beginning and at the end — creating a circularity as well.
As I ventured into “Summer to Autumn” the colours got deeper and stronger with swirlier white elements too representing higher trillier piano notes and leaves falling from the trees.
“Winter to Spring” is very intense and has lots of red and hot pink colours and whiter tumbling notes like a waterfall emanating from a cavern — it felt like the two seasons were battling each other at times so there is a duality around this section as it leads back into summer but the light is positively pushing through. It’s also rather serendipitous that there is a red heart-shaped element there which emerged quite unconsciously — something that tends to happen with my more intuitive and abstract artworks….
There is a shift when “Spring to Summer” lightens up a bit more with quite a lot of white high-end piano notes again representing the new growth, then everything starts to get hotter and yellower and ends quite passionately and strongly with the more colourful and celebratory colours in the bottom right-hand corner.
I have entitled this piece of artwork ade’s Four Seasons and it can be purchased as a 300 mm × 300 mm limited edition print.